Farming the Dust Bowl: A First-Hand Account from Kansas - Softcover

Svobida, Lawrence

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0700602909 ISBN 13: 9780700602902

Publisher: Univ Pr of Kansas, 1986

Synopsis

After northern Wisconsin was cleared by commercial loggers early in the twentieth century, enthusiastic promoters and optimistic settlers envisioned transforming this "cutover" into a land of yeoman farmers. Here thousands of families—mostly immigrants or second-generation Americans—sought to recreate old worlds and build new farms on land that would come to be considered agriculturally worthless. In the end, they succumbed not to drought or soil depletion but to social and political pressures from those who looked askance at their way of life.

Farming the Cutover describes the visions and accomplishments of these settlers from their own perspective. People of the cutover managed to forge lives relatively independent of market pressures; and for this they were characterized as backward by outsiders and their part of the state was seen as a hideout for organized crime figures. State and federal planners, county agents, and agriculture professors eventually determined that the cutover could be engineered and the lives of its inhabitants improved. By 1940, they had begun to implement public policies that discouraged farming and they eventually decided that the region should be depopulated and the forests replanted.

By exploring the history of an eighteen-county region, Robert Gough illustrates the travails of farming in "marginal" areas. He juxtaposes the social history of the farmers with the opinions and programs of the experts who sought to improve the region, and shows how what occurred in the Wisconsin cutover anticipated the sweeping changes that would transform American agriculture after World War II. Farming the Cutover is a readable story of the hopes and failures of people who struggled to build new lives in an inhospitable environment. It makes an important counterpoint to Turnerian myths and the more commonly-told success stories of farming history.

About this title

From the Back Cover

This is the story of Lawrence Svobida, a Kansas wheat farmer who fought searing drought, wind, erosion, and economic hard times in the Dust Bowl. It is a vivid account by a farmer who pitted his physical strength, mental faculties, and financial resources against the environment as nature wreaked havoc across the southern Great Plains. Svobida's description of Dust Bowl agriculture is important not only because it accurately describes farming in that region but also because it is one of the few first-hand accounts that remain of the frightening and still haunting dust-laden decade of the 1930's.

About the Author

R. Douglas Hurt is professor and director of the graduate program in agricultural history and rural studies at Iowa State University and editor of the journal Agricultural History. Among his many books are Indian Agriculture in America: Prehistory to the Present and The Rural West Since World War II.

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ Pr of Kansas
• Publication date: 1986
• ISBN 10: 0700602909
• ISBN 13: 9780700602902
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 256